Category: IT

For a demo Azure Logic App I need to setup an Azure Cognitive Services account for the Computer Vision API.
I set up the resources in Azure using an ARM template so that everything is created in a reproducible way.
My logic app needs a connection to the Cognitive Services, which consists in an API Key and an endpoint.

I am a heavy user of the Azure Cloud Shell, I use it every day working with the CLI 2.0 to deal with my Azure Resources.

If, like me, the first time you started the Cloud Shell and followed the wizard and clicked on the button “Create Storage”, you ended up with a new Resource Group containing a Storage Account with a random name.

I don’t like random names with my resources, so I will show you how to control this and mount the Azure Cloud Shell with a Storage Account of your choice.

I’m using more and more the Azure CLI 2.0, which makes my scripting life with Azure Resources a lot easier.

The default output of the Azure CLI is json, but you can also use other kind of output formats, as described in this blog.

I want to have some variables that I can reuse in other commands, so let’s say I want to get the name of all the Resource Groups which have a tag called Kind with a value VM, I can use the following JMESPath query:

Yesterday I was trying to mount a data volume in a Docker container and using Docker Community Edition for Windows (aka Docker CE for Windows) you first need to share your drives in the Docker settings:

Unfortunately after clicking on “Apply” I got the following error:

A firewall is blocking file Sharing between Windows and the containers.

Today I want to show a really useful Azure feature to help you with the governance of your Azure Subscriptions: Azure Resource Policies:

Resource policies enable you to establish conventions for resources in your organization. By defining conventions, you can control costs and more easily manage your resources. For example, you can specify that only certain types of virtual machines are allowed, or you can require that all resources have a particular tag. Policies are inherited by all child resources. So, if a policy is applied to a resource group, it is applicable to all the resources in that resource group.

How Resource Policies works

First of all, you need a policy definition. Here a description of the structure.

Let’s create one!

You can create policies definitions directly with the Azure Rest API or using PowerShell, the Azure CLI 1.0 or 2.0.

I prefer using PowerShell:

First login in Azure with: Login-AzureRmAccount and if you have more subscriptions, select the right one with Select-AzureRmSubscription.

For both the suggested ways (3-clicks or manual), there are some concerns from my side about the principal setup, which I think they could be improved:

The principal which is created during the process gets the “Contributor” role granted on the whole Azure subscription, and using the manual powershell script, the default role is even “Owner” (this can be modified).

The name of the Active Directory Application/Principal is some random guid which is difficult to be identified, see this picture:

In this post I want to show you what I think it’s the best way to setup VSTS working with Azure Resource Manager Templates.

Introduction

At the customer I am currently working for, we are setting up a new Azure Big Data ingestion environment and we wanted to do it using the Infrastructure as Code approach. With Azure this obviously goes with ARM Templates.

For source control, build and deployment we use Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS).

About VSTS, Build and Release Management

I have seen different setups with VSTS, some of them where the deployment take place from the build, or directly in Release Management without a build.

My approach is to have a clear separation of concerns between the Build and the Release Management.
The Build is for compiling, (Unit) Testing and creating artifacts for the deployment.
The Release Management’s responsibility is for deploying the artifacts created during the Build process. Continue reading “Setting up VSTS with ARM Templates”

When testing deployments of Azure RM resources (ie. using the Test-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment powershell cmdlet) an empty Resource Group is created. This Resource Group is often not needed at this point and can be deleted after you are done testing the deployment of the resources. For deleting the Resource Group you can use the VSTS task delete resource group if empty. This tasks deletes the Resource Group only if it does not contains any resources.